Thinking Out Loud: The Political Spectrum

So I recently took the political compass quiz, and as expected I ended up in the bottom-left corner (for those that don't know, the horizontal axis is economic left/right and the vertical axis is authoritarian/libertarian, so the bottom left is libertarian socialism). That got me thinking - how exactly should the political spectrum be laid out? We can agree that the left is socialism (that is, worker ownership of the means of production) and the right is capitalism (that is, private ownership of the means of production), but what about terms like "far left", "centre-right" and so on? In this post, I'll be setting forth my idea of how we define these terms.

If the term "left-wing" refers to socialists, then it makes sense that the more stringently someone applies the principles of socialism, the further left on the spectrum they should be placed. The most basic principle of socialism, as mentioned above, is that workers should control their workplaces. There are two different schools of thought in regard to how this should be acheived. On the one hand, authoritarian socialists (Trotskyists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists etc.) hold the view that the state should control the means of production and the workers should control the state via a dictatorship of the proletariat - that is, a democratic society with an active and politically conscious working class. On the other, libertarian socialists (anarchists, communalists, council communists and some Marxists) take the view that the workers should exert direct control. Libertarian socialists, then, advocate for a greater degree of worker control than their authoritarian counterparts, and so should be placed further to the left, with the most dogmatic anarcho-communists and individualists at the extreme end of the spectrum due to their refusal of any workplace hierarchy at all; they would be followed by anarcho-syndicalists and the other libsocs, then the Trots, Maoists, and finally the Marxist-Leninists. On this newly rearranged scale, Stalin would be only slightly to the left of Jeremy Corbyn.

But now that I've mentioned Corbyn, we come to a new question: what about democratic socialists? Their insistence on building socialism by slow reform sets them apart from the rest of us, who agree - from Mao Zedong to Renzo Novatore - that violent revolution and the suppression of reactionaries is the only way to break the power of the ruling class. This, to me, speaks of a fundamental ignorance of the nature of capitalism, and it is enough to place Attlee, Chavez and their like closer to the centre than the Leninists, especially since demsocs are so vague on how, exactly, they intend to change the class character of the state.

I'll go into the right-hand side of the spectrum in my next post, as to do so here would make this post way too long.